mjp
Founding member
I was innocently reading an article on WIRED when I came across this nugget of prevailing wisdom:
Those kind of touchy-feely descriptions of sound are usually thrown about by a species known as audiophiles. They believe that as a group, they are blessed with aural perception much greater than the average human. They are not, of course, but when you spend fifteen thousand dollars on a turntable, you have to justify the ridiculous excessiveness somehow.
Fact is, most people - and by most I mean all - don't have audio equipment in their homes that is capable of producing sound that can be analyzed in detail, so all these descriptions are subjective.
The "digital sucks" argument does have a basis in reality though, because early digital did suck. Early CDs were up against storage limits so they sacrificed data (sound) to jam more music on a disc. And the recording studio wasn't much better. I worked on an album at Sony's state-of-the-art digital studio in the late 80s, and the result was horrible.
But it's been quite some time since we've been saddled with those harsh sounding recordings created by machines that could only capture relatively low bitrates. The standard professional digital recording equipment now will capture more sound than your brain can process, and can reproduce frequencies on both ends of the spectrum that humans can't even hear.
It's funny, because in the guitar world a lot of people (myself included) prefer old analog effects and amplifiers. But what we love about those things are the character introduced into the sound by the limitations in the technology. They are noisy, sensitive, and sometimes unpredictable. So naturally they are great! For making guitar noises. But analog audio is no different. It's noisy, unstable, and impermanent, yet people still cling to it as "superior," based on a bunch of hocus-pocus nonsense, or subjective bullshite.
I would like to see a blind study where you played these people the same source recording but told them one was digital and one was analog. I guaran-damn-tee you that every one of them would say one sounded warmer and fuller, while one was harsh and uninviting.
This is well-known human psychology actually, and studies have been done where two food samples are cut from the same hunk of whatever, but test subjects are told that one is high quality and one is generic. The test subjects overwhelmingly claimed a preference for one of the samples, assuming that the one they preferred was of higher quality.
It's all in our heads, this stuff. Or our ears, I guess.
"Witness the resurgence of LPs, which have a warmer sound than digital tracks, and often reveal a different, more subtle side of the music."
Those kind of touchy-feely descriptions of sound are usually thrown about by a species known as audiophiles. They believe that as a group, they are blessed with aural perception much greater than the average human. They are not, of course, but when you spend fifteen thousand dollars on a turntable, you have to justify the ridiculous excessiveness somehow.
Fact is, most people - and by most I mean all - don't have audio equipment in their homes that is capable of producing sound that can be analyzed in detail, so all these descriptions are subjective.
The "digital sucks" argument does have a basis in reality though, because early digital did suck. Early CDs were up against storage limits so they sacrificed data (sound) to jam more music on a disc. And the recording studio wasn't much better. I worked on an album at Sony's state-of-the-art digital studio in the late 80s, and the result was horrible.
But it's been quite some time since we've been saddled with those harsh sounding recordings created by machines that could only capture relatively low bitrates. The standard professional digital recording equipment now will capture more sound than your brain can process, and can reproduce frequencies on both ends of the spectrum that humans can't even hear.
It's funny, because in the guitar world a lot of people (myself included) prefer old analog effects and amplifiers. But what we love about those things are the character introduced into the sound by the limitations in the technology. They are noisy, sensitive, and sometimes unpredictable. So naturally they are great! For making guitar noises. But analog audio is no different. It's noisy, unstable, and impermanent, yet people still cling to it as "superior," based on a bunch of hocus-pocus nonsense, or subjective bullshite.
I would like to see a blind study where you played these people the same source recording but told them one was digital and one was analog. I guaran-damn-tee you that every one of them would say one sounded warmer and fuller, while one was harsh and uninviting.
This is well-known human psychology actually, and studies have been done where two food samples are cut from the same hunk of whatever, but test subjects are told that one is high quality and one is generic. The test subjects overwhelmingly claimed a preference for one of the samples, assuming that the one they preferred was of higher quality.
It's all in our heads, this stuff. Or our ears, I guess.
